“20th Century Women”

***

(R, 1:18)

“20th Century Women” isn’t a great film, but it does something great. It replicates a quality of memory in a way that I’ve never quite seen before. It captures the way we think about people we knew and the lives they lived when we remember them from the distance of decades.

Written and directed by Mike Mills, and loosely based on his own childhood, it tells the story of a teenage boy being raised by a single mother in a big house in Santa Barbara, Calif. To make extra money, Mom has two boarders, a teenage girl and a young woman in her 20s. They become a kind of family, and all three end up raising the boy.

Mills was born in 1966, and for a lot of us who lived a substantial portion of our lives in the last century, there’s a weird thing that sometimes happens as we think of people from our past who were older than we were. They were 20th-century people. They saw the world through 20th-century eyes. They had the options that were available at the time, and now we know how things worked out for them. Looking back brings mixed feelings of omniscience and helplessness, as well as awe before the mystery. And that is the feeling that Mills creates and instills.

He does this, at least in part, by consistently reminding the audience that it’s looking at the past. He doesn’t establish an illusion of the past and try to bring the audience into it. Instead he establishes convincingly the 1979 setting and then keeps the audience mentally in the 21st century. For example, miniature life histories are given for the three central women, played by Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning. These are presented in documentary style, with archival photos and voice-over narration. Each has a history and each is part of history.

Mom (Bening) is in her mid-50s, which means she had her son in her early 40s. She’s a fretting mother and yet a free spirit, with odd idiosyncrasies, such as inviting random people over for dinner. As the story begins, she finds herself losing contact with her son, unable to penetrate his adolescent angst, and so she asks Julie (Fanning) and Abbie (Gerwig) to look out for him, too. Each does her best, within the limits of her ability.

Abbie tries to teach Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) to be a sensitive man and tells him about women’s orgasms. With Julie the situation is especially fraught. She is only a couple of years older than Jamie, and he is in love with her. But she regards him as a best friend, leans on him for relationship advice and has the habit of stripping down to her underwear and climbing into his bed to express sisterly closeness.

Tangentially, the world outside goes by — the world is always tangential, except in times of calamity — and so we hear and see manifestations of things like punk rock. One Sunday, family and friends gather around to hear President Jimmy Carter deliver the national sermon that went down in history as “the malaise speech.” The moment is real. The nation really did stop everything to take in that speech. As any modern viewer will recognize while revisiting it, much of what Carter warned about has already come to pass.

Bening is wonderful, as she always is when she gets a role worthy of her. The narration insists that Mom was a totally original and a magnificent force, and Bening gives us that. She smokes constantly in the film — it borders on distracting, like watching an actress and a character try to kill themselves. But it’s not exactly inaccurate. In 1979 it was still possible to find otherwise intelligent, sensible people smoking around the clock. They were duly toasted by their survivors on New Year’s 2000.

“20th Century Women” is not especially dramatic. At times it eschews drama. Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter. But this time the strategy works. It feels real. And though Mills never makes us care about these people as much as he does, we receive “20th Century Women” as a privileged communication. It meant something to him, and thus reminds us of what means something to us.